America wants Canada to keep at least some forces in Afghanistan. Canada, after all, makes an important contribution to the war effort there, and Prime Minister Harper has been under pressure to withdraw. So, in the era of Smart Power(tm), how does Secretary of State Clinton go about doing this?

Clinton rebukes Canada at Arctic meeting

It was supposed to be a meeting of polar pals. But a high-level session on the vast opportunities opening up in the Arctic got off to a chilly start Monday, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized Canada for leaving several players off the guest list.

The Canadian government invited foreign ministers from the other four countries with Arctic coastlines — Russia, Norway, Denmark and the United States — to hold talks on developing the region, which is being transformed by climate change.

Within a few years, the Arctic’s ice blanket could melt for at least a few months a year, opening up access to huge oil and gas reserves, as well as a new shipping lane. Under a United Nations treaty, the Arctic countries can claim ownership of natural resources up to 200 miles off their coasts.

Clinton noted that the three other nations in the Arctic region — Sweden, Finland and Iceland — had complained they were not included in the meeting. She said she also was contacted by representatives of indigenous groups in the area that had been left off the list.

“Significant international discussions on Arctic issues should include those who have legitimate interests in the region,” Clinton said, according to a prepared copy of her remarks to the meeting, which was closed to press. “And I hope the Arctic will always showcase our ability to work together, not create new divisions.”

You would think the Secretary of State of the United States would understand the basics of diplomacy, including the idea that issues between two nations rarely stand in isolation and that the status of one may affect the other. Or how about common courtesy, such as not chastising a valued ally in public over minor protocol issues?

Of course, this boorish behavior rests on one of the pillars of Obama Doctrine, that the United States has no real friends or enemies, and that conflict is reduced when we are an impartial arbiter between all. As Seth Cropsey described it in his article “Remedial Diplomacy,”

Barack Obama’s theory is that partisanship is the source of conflict. There should be no more red states or blue states. Every political choice is a false choice, an example of old thinking. Similarly on the international stage. If the United States distanced itself from its allies and drew closer to its adversaries, conflict would be reduced. The United States could then serve as the international mediator rather than as the guarantor of global order and an agent of democratic political change.

But, the real world doesn’t operate that way. Cozening up to North Korea, Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela, while backhanding Great Britain, Israel, Canada, Poland, and the Czech Republic will only signal to our allies that we’re unreliable while telling our rivals that we’re feckless.

This is what they meant by “smart power?” It’s more like a recipe for a weakened United States and, therefore, a more dangerous world.

So says British scientist James Lovelock (Wikipedia bio), who thinks we’re all too stupid to deal with a (nonexistent) problem that only Supreme Geniuses(tm) are smart enough to recognize. The only hope of the sheep Mankind is to institute a dictatorship of the really smart!

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.

It follows a tumultuous few months in which public opinion on efforts to tackle climate change has been undermined by events such as the climate scientists’ emails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA)and the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit.

“I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change,” said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA emails last November. “The inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful.”

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is “modern democracy”, he added. “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”

Here we have fascist elitism at its most exposed: “You fools can’t understand vast complexities, and so must be lead like children or animals, guided by your betters. You’re getting sleepy, very sleepy….”

What garbage. I’m not denying there are stupid people in the world (hint: Joe Biden), but what really bothers elitists such as Lovelock is that people lacking the proper degrees have the temerity to question and even disagree with him and his brethren. In this modern information age, people can seek their own sources independent of the Lovelocks of the world, whether on the Web or between the covers of a good book. And if they’re more than a bit skeptical of what “their betters” are telling them, perhaps it’s because they’ve been pandered and lied to.

It’s not an attitude limited to Lovelock and a few others, nor is it new by any means. Woodrow Wilson, a US president, thought the Constitution was obsolete, that limited, participatory government got in the way of progress. Erudite men such as H.G. Wells, who advocated a form of fascism, and George Bernard Shaw, a supporter of eugenics, felt that Man simply couldn’t be left to govern himself, that he had to be lead by an elite. Their intellectual descendants sit in the White House and run Congress today.

(I can’t let this moment go by without again shilling for Goldberg’s brilliant book, Liberal Fascism, which surveys the history of the fascist idea from the French Revolution to the modern day, though I think he needs to add a chapter for the Green Statists of the Cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming.)

Anyway, back to Dr. Lovelock and his annoyance with democracy. If you ever needed a reason to fight the global warming fraud besides the bad science behind it, there you have it. It’s not nearly so much about “saving the planet” as it is about controlling it.